Thinking @ Speed of Light

I was just browsing around the internet and came across this video  which described how to make your own Makey Makey board using an  Arduino Leonardo . I had all the components laying around at home so I decided to make my own. Here is a video where i used 4 glasses of water to play some drums from  http://www.virtualdrumming.com/ . No I can't play music, well not right now anyway :-). The Makey makey is basically a circuit that converts anything conductive - even slightly conductive (Metal, Coins, Bananas, Humans, Coke Cans, Glass of Water, etc.) into a button on your keyboard. You connect a wire from the circuit to the object you want to make into a button (key). Connect your self to the wire from the circuit labeled "hand". Done. Now the moment you touch the object it will send a key-press (example 'a') to your computer via USB.  Using the Arduino Leonardo you can convert up-to 6 objects into a key at any given tim...

A couple of months ago I bought a Canon 600D to for a series of workshops i will be conducting as part of my new initiative -  Mistri Labs . Here are some of my sample shots from my first few months of experimenting.  For more info on ISO, Aperture, Shutter Speed you can goto photos.abhimanyukumar.in . Also here is a timelaspe video i shot: 104 frames with a 30s exposure. To click some of these pics i made my own equipment such as an intervellometer using an Arduino and some bokeh filters. I shall be posting details about them as and when time permits.

For my 50th blog post i decided to post videos of the crash of the Pearl EPO Glider 800. The crash happened on our first try on the 18th of December. I would have posted the videos on that date but we had recorded the videos using a sony handycam and it took some time to extract the videos (I hate sony handycams and their non standard USB's and Memory Cards). Anyway i did manage to get the videos and here they are. Enjoy First Try Second Try Ill fix it up and have it up as soon as i have some free time.In the mean while enjoy he pics of the broken plane:

Recently (by that i mean about 2 months ago) brought a glider from www.rchobbyaddict.com. Have finally managed to assemble it.  Here are some pics and a video of the glider. It uses a brush-less DC motor, 4 servo motors, and a 2S1P 800mah battery. Will give detailed specs in a post in one or 2 days after the flight.   

First of all the name. I've decided to go with CPUV (or Chatur-Pankh-Udaan-Vastu). Thanks Anshuman for suggesting that name. In the last post i mentioned that i was going to do a test flight and put up a video so here they are: For the test we (me and my roommate mudit ) initially decided to use a RF link to control the quadcopter but due to some technical difficulties (i.e laziness, unwillingness to work and a general lack of interest in actually doing so) we could not actually use that so we put a small program on an ATMEGA16 that initializes the motors and then gradually increases the speed of the motors till it reaches a maximum and then to minimum rather quickly and then repeats the process over and over again. Now the quadrocopter does not have any gyros or accelerometers as of now to stabilize it (More in part 4) therefore i had to tie it down to a table or else it would have taken of...

I was trying to make something cool using After Effects and was looking through the Video Copilot site which has some very nice and more importantly free tutorials for after effects.After searching through the entire collection of tutorials i decided to make the Green Smoke Tutorial . At that time we( Mudit , DJ and me) were also working on a college project for a 3D rendering program (will upload details when completed) so i decided to use the technique to make the logo for the project. So here it is: It took me about 30 mins to complete the entire thing. Here is the embedded video if you can't see it.

Here are some renders of a Ferrari F430 model made and textured by me using 3Ds max 2009 with mental ray. Here is a video of the same model with the color transition done in After Effects CS3.

About a month back i posted about a project on controlling a pong game running on the computer with the help of a mobile phone (Samsung Wave S8500 - Bada OS) used for the paddles. Now we ( ankur and me) decided to take it to the next level and went on to make a generic game controller for any game running on the computer using android.The application name is " GAME ON " For this we make use of the phone's sensors and touch screen to generate different gestures and motion events; used these events to generate control data and sent the control data over a socket to the computer over a wireless network. Now using the received data (different for each motion event or gesture) the computer performs a certain task.

Character animation done in 3Ds max. Model of a soldier downloaded form the web. Rigged using biped and Physique Modifier.Applied some .bip (motion capture) files to it. Then and rendered it out in using mental ray with daylight system for shadows and lighting.

I saw this tutorial on how to make a logo engraving and decided to go ahead and make it. Here is the final result. The original tutorial site are here (for the engraving) and here(for the sparks).

Here are a few still of the model of Lamborghini Reventon that i created .. there is also a cloth covering the car .. this has been done using cloth simulation in 3ds Max 2009... Cloth Covering WireFrames Model - No Texture Model - With Texture Video - Music provided by my friend Akash Sharma Update: Here is the version with photometric lighting Update 2: Anaglyph Red-Cyan 3D image PS: Will be posting cloth simulation tutorial asap.....